How do empty strings affect sorting?

Ruby Apps Ferret
1

I’m creating a search that allows results to be sorted in different
ways. In defining the sortable fields, I was careful to use untokenized
indexes. Everything was working great except for one field-- it refused
to sort properly, even though all the others were fine.

It seems as if the presence of empty strings in my data were to blame.
By setting them to a default value, sorting on that field suddenly
worked fine. Why is that? The same failure happened when I changed the
empty strings to nulls.

Do I always have to check for empty strings or nulls when defining sort
fields?

2

On 8/12/06, Bill L. [email protected] wrote:

Do I always have to check for empty strings or nulls when defining sort
fields?

Hi Bill,

This is a bug which has sort of been fixed in the latest version. I
say sort of because the solution is not really ideal. For integer or
float fields the default value is set to 0. Ideally, I think
undefined values should come after defined values no matter what the
order but this is a little harder to do with the current
implementation. It works for string fields but not for integer and
float fields.

Cheers,
Dave